Change these 5 settings in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)!

If you don’t make these changes, then your Google Analytics 4 account won’t show data as accurately as it could, which may lead to some missed revenue opportunities.

The key default settings to change are:

1) Adjust session timeout
2) List unwanted referrals
3) Configure your domains (a.k.a. “Cross-domain tracking”)
4) Data retention
5) Reporting identity

If you would like to get a comprehensive guide to Google Analytics 4, then grab a copy of our Google Analytics Guide.

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Video Transcription

0:00
Change these five settings in Google
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Analytics 4 or else you’re only ever
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going to have two months worth of user
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data in your reports visitors to your
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website may not be tracked correctly and
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it’s all totally avoidable if you just
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make these Quick Settings changes so we
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did a training on Google Analytics 4
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and this is a small snippet from that
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training so we’re going to show you how
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to change these settings right now
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step two
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there are some key default settings that
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I want you to be aware of
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and the first one here
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is going to be your your session timeout
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and you can go to data streams to take a
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look at that
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that’s going to be in here
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and then I believe it was configure
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the tag settings here
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and then by default they only show you
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three you gotta click on show all
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and here is the session timeout
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so by default so I actually changed this
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already
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by default it is
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30 minutes I believe
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so you’ll go in there you’ll see
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something like this
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a reason to increase it would be if if
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you are actively blogging on your site
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and people actually like
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you know if they went to your site and
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they’re reading a longer article they
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might actually get distracted
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go make themselves launch go have lunch
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come back maybe an hour later
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if more time has passed uh the past the
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session time out once that same person
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starts reading that same article it’s
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going to be counted as a new session
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so to prevent that
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that that’s actually why I would
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recommend just increasing that and the
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maximum you can do is 755
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I haven’t really thought of a a reason
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where that
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would be a problem to have a maximum a
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very large timeout
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um
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yeah if you can think of a reason to not
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do that curious to get your thoughts
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um but the problem there again would be
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somebody coming to your site
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and then uh not doing something for 30
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minutes they’ll time out and then once
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they start engaging with your site again
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Google will trigger a new session
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um and that’ll effectively be direct
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traffic to your site that new session
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so you would lose the um
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this the traffic source
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all right this next one is going to be
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unwanted referrals
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um a classic example will be for
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e-commerce businesses
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if you’re sending traffic to say PayPal
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and then PayPal is redirecting that
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traffic back to your site
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you um
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you you don’t want your reports to be
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showing you a lot of referral traffic
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from PayPal because PayPal is not really
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referring you a lot of traffic they’re
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just sending your traffic back to you
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um so if you have that kind of a
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situation you’ll want to go to
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um
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The Unwanted referrals list
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which is the same area here in the data
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stream
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list unwanted referrals
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and you can see we actually use a tool
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called Infusionsoft for order processing
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so that’s why I put in Infusionsoft here
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that way
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any traffic that went to infusion
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software in order and then got
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redirected redirected back to our site
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Google’s not going to consider that a
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new session that was referred by
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Infusionsoft
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ah and then chip just going back to the
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timeout that does not affect the time on
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site time on site will be determined by
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how long the person is actually
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um on your site
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um well yes if if they left
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and then came back
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let’s say an hour later it will skew the
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time on site to a
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to a higher number so that’s correct
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um and then Kim yes you would add sub
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domains to this section here if you
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don’t want
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uh your own sub domains to be counted as
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a referral and that’s we don’t have any
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on our site but uh I did list www
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um
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as well as uh without it
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next is going to be cross domain traffic
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with tracking which is very similar to
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what we just talked about
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um
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so again in that example where you send
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traffic over to PayPal and then comes
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back to your site
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if you don’t set up cross domain
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tracking
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then uh
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anyone that goes from your domain over
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to another domain and then comes back
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that will trigger a new session
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but you really want to track that as one
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session you want somebody who let’s say
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clicked on an ad went to your site then
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paid on PayPal’s domain and then came
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back to your site you want that to be
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one session
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and you want to be able to see that okay
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that came from a paid ad and then they
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they made it through that whole path to
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the purchase
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and the way you do that is you need to
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add in your uh your domains
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configure your domains right here
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so just configure any domains as well as
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subdomains
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all right next is data retention and
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this by default is going to be two
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months
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which is pretty short we’re going to get
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to um the exploration reporting later
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and if you don’t change this you’ll only
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be able to use that report for the last
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two months
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so for this we’re going to data settings
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so I’m in Google Analytics the admin
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area which you can get to by clicking
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the the gear icon
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and then data settings is right here
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and then data retention
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and you can see I already changed this
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they give you two months by default and
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then you have the option to go a maximum
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of 14 months
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foreign
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and you just want to save that
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I agree
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I don’t know why it’s only two months I
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I mean I guess from uh Google’s
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perspective they don’t want to have to
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store all that data so it does make
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sense to me from just a cost savings
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perspective
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all right the last thing I want to touch
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on here is reporting identity
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uh and I add some notes here just
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there’s three options by default I
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believe it’s going to be Blended
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and that’s going to be the most accurate
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way to track for cross device tracking
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and this is Google’s solution for people
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using multiple devices which is very
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typical now you might
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advertise and get somebody on their
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mobile device that you know they click
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on an ad check out your site
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but they don’t actually do anything
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they don’t make a purchase and then
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later on maybe that day or at night
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uh or the next day even they go onto
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their computer
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go back to the to your site and place an
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order
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there are ways for Google to figure out
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that that is the same person
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that use the mo that clicked on an ad
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with their mobile device and then made a
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purchase on their computer
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they’re most accurate process is called
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blended it uses a lot of different data
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points
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the problem with that
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is it’s going to
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some of your reports will hit a
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threshold
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and you won’t get all of your data in
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those reports and then there’s observed
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which is
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not not as accurate as Blended but then
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the trade-off there is you’re not hiding
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as much data in your reports and then
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there’s device based
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which is the least accurate for cross
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domain or cross-device tracking
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but then that opens up more data in your
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report so if you’re
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running into issues with your reports
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this can happen a lot for businesses
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that don’t get a lot of traffic to their
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site
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Google will say that they’re withholding
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data due to the threshold
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um
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which basically means if they showed
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that data they think that you’d be able
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to match the traffic to real people so
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they they have some safeguards in place
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from uh
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just like an identity personal
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identification issue where if they
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show the information they’re scared
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you’d be able to match it to actual
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people
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um so what they do is they hide that
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data uh you know in the reports they’ll
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say it’s due to the threshold limits
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so I just wanted to make you aware of
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that
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and if you want to change it
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you go into
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the admin area here you can change the
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change this at any time it does not
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impact
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your your data you can kind of toggle in
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between these and just see how it
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impacts your reports so again by default
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it’ll be Blended
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and you can see
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it uses user IDs Google signals device
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IDs and modeled data
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and then observed is the same except for
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it’s not using any model data and then
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device based is only using the device ID
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so you can use your reports in Blended
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and I just want you to you to be aware
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that if you run into a report
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and you’ll even see some discrepancies
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in the data you might see um you know
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that you have a lot of conversions
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but the report is you know you know
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you’ve got 30 conversions the report is
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only showing you 10. and then when you
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look at that report it’s telling you
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it’s limiting the data due to the
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threshold what you can do is come in
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here change it to device based
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save that
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and then that should give you more data
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in that report
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all right I hope you enjoyed today’s
12:05
training on Google Analytics 4 and some
12:07
of the settings changes that you need to
12:09
make today ideally and if you want to
12:11
learn more about Google Analytics 4 just
12:14
know that we put together a step-by-step
12:16
ebook that’s going to show you
12:17
everything you need to know
12:19
please you find out things like who’s
12:21
visiting your website where are they
12:23
coming from what are they doing on your
12:25
website among a lot of other things so
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you can get a copy of that PDF by
12:30
clicking the link below